A Portrait of Grandmother
My Paternal Grandmother
I have vivid memories of my father’s mother. Born in 1915, she died at almost 95, in 2009. I remember receiving the phone call about her passing from my mother. I was 26 then, still drinking, sitting on the plush verdant lawn of San Francisco State, trying, for the millionth time, to achieve a bachelor’s degree. By then Grandma had been living in a fancy assisted living facility in Santa Barbara for over a decade.
What I recall best about Grandma Vivian—always old to me, wrinkle-faced, snow-white-haired, blue-eyed, with that curled, mountain lion-like laugh—was her home. She had a palatial house—I understood it to be a mansion—on the Oregon coast. The home must have been 10,000 square feet. It was gargantuan, at least in my child’s memory. Two stories. The ceiling in the main room must have been 200 feet high, or so it seemed.
I remember a gazebo outside, which a little narrow sidewalk led you to, redwood chips filling both sides of the walkway. There was a cliff which the house was perched on, and below was the sea, and a bridge (the continuation of Highway 101), and a little inlet. In the room closest to the cliff’s edge there were massive floor-to-ceiling windows. I remember standing there, eyeing the sea and the inlet and the bridge, seeing trucks and cars shimmy north and south for hours.
I didn’t know then—in the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was a boy—that Grandma had once been a runway model, that she’d married my grandfather out of college after telling him she didn’t love him but being persuaded by the money he promised her he’d make (which he did), that she’d virtually tortured my mother all her life because my mom had committed the cardinal sin of having had a previous marriage and a child from that young immature bond, and for not initially being highly educated when she and my father first met. (Mom later got a master’s degree.) Grandma Vivian organized their wedding, and made my mother wear a red dress. She was “tainted.” Every year, Grandma got Mom a Weight Watcher’s packet as a gift for Christmas. And my mother cried each time.
But this wasn’t the grandmother I knew, of course. I was a kid. She’d lay on the electronic bed with me for hours—joined by her massive stuffed chocolate Lab which doubled as a pillow—and giggle as I used the remote control to move the bed slowly up and down, up and down, up and down.
I was fascinated by that house. I remember the 100-year-old pool table upstairs, which nobody used except myself, my father, and, once, my best friend who came up there with me. That was my Grandma’s 80th birthday, in 1995. I was 12, as was my best friend. I can still smell the old musty scent of that pool table, the ancient, tearing green felt, and I can hear the loud crack of the balls when we played. The balls were old and faded in color, as was the green felt of the table. The cues, too, were very old, slightly bent. And I remember the dusty explosion of blue when we chalked the tips of our cues.
I also remember her gargantuan library, also upstairs, down a short hallway from the pool table. Once, my best friend and I went in there and looked up high at the dozens of shelves of thick books. We eventually found books about sex. I found one that was an illustrated guide to sex and sexual organs. We were fascinated, and we sat there together Indian style staring at the detailed drawings of penises, vaginas, breasts, nipples. I recall feeling scared and excited all at once. Then, from downstairs, we heard my parents wondering aloud where we were. Dad called out to us. We gazed at each other, smiled, and didn’t respond. Then Mom called. Same silence. We’d located something sacrosanct. Something crucial somehow. Something important. Then Grandma said, I think they’ve found the sex books. And we’d been exposed, found out, ruined.
But mostly I remember the musty, dusty garage, where Grandma parked her big silver Lincoln Continental, the hanging tennis ball always just touching the windshield. That smell of a basement, a sort of cloying stink which I always associated with Grandma Vivian. The shelves of tools. The white smooth surface of all the closed cabinets. And the kitchen, right next to said garage. Always with the smell of cinnamon-raisin toast, thick Irish butter, raspberry jelly and black Colombian coffee wafting in the early morning.
There were large trees outside, tall and thick like Pines. A forest. The scent of wet tree leaves mingled with the redwood chips sprinkled everywhere, and the distant stink of the nearby sea, which you could hear as the small waves gloriously crashed, producing a calming, Zen-like effect.
Several times we took an Amtrak train north from Oxnard—near Ojai, where I grew up—up to southern Oregon and then rented a car and drove to her palace. Later Dad told me the house, though massive, had been purchased for only $200,000 in 1975. It wasn’t a very nice house, it was just massive. She later sold it and moved into assisted living in Santa Barbara.
For many years, as a kid, Grandma would always be there at Christmas. She gave me the same gift each year: A plastic maze with a little silver ball which, when you landed the ball into the very center of the complex maze, opened the contraption, allowing you to take the crisp, brand-new $100 bill. It was different from my maternal grandfather, who didn’t have much money and who always gave me random things like a Cuban cigar box full of old toys and trinkets and tools, which I cherished. But there was something about cold hard cash, even then.
I never really knew my grandmother. I was only 26 when she died, and mainly I saw her when we visited her palace every few years, or else at Christmas. I was too angry, confused and selfish in my pre-teens, and too wild and out-of-control in my teens and most of my twenties. But I regret that now. I got sober at 27, not long after she died. Looking back, I wish I’d tried harder to connect with her. To my father she’d always been cold and unloving, clinical and dire. To my mother she’d been mean, ruthless and cruel. But to me, her son’s son, she’d always been wonderful.
I was there... Wow I could even smell it.